I put the last of the deer rifles away for the winter yesterday. It’s time to begin playing with my meat until Turkey Season. Angus gave me a wonderful gift for Christmas, a food dehydrator. This is a serious jerky machine. I just finished unloading load #1 from it. It makes awesome stuff.

The unit he got me is a Magic Mill.  This model holds 6 trays and can process 5lbs of venison at a time.  The net product is just a hair under 2 lbs per batch.  The unit is simple to operate.  It has a display and buttons to adjust time and temperature.  My first batch ran at 160 F for 10 hours.  I heard it beep when it turned of this AM at 0100.  That is a cool feature.  I’ve over-dried a batch doing it the old way.

What was the old way?  Well, I have a set of trays that have been serving me well for over a decade.  They stack.  I bought six and they stack nicely in the oven.  I then set the oven on low and leave the door open a crack.  The racks pretty much fill up the oven, and they were a bear to get clean, because they were too big for the dishwasher.  The new racks are smaller and fit easily stacked vertically.

For details on my old method, check out this post:

Venison Jerky

That let me do about 10 lbs in a batch.  However, the process was a grueling all-day affair and I had to cut the oven off when I went to bed and finish the next day.

Another innovation  for this first batch in the new dehydrator is that I used a simplified recipe:

2-lbs venison

1/2 cup of Dale’s Liquid Steak Seasoning

1 Ounce Montreal Steak Seasoning

1 Tablespoon  Red Pepper Flakes (more if you want it hot)

I made up about a triple-batch of the marinade and let the venison soak in it for 2 hours.  The second batch I put in this morning has soaked in it for 18 hours.  I doubt the soak time is all that important simply because all the liquid is gone by the time the meat hits the rack.

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